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With only four days to go before my bandmates were to show up, I knew I’d have to change my plans somewhat in order to finish the drum track for the final song, Ode to Soup. It’s a longish and somewhat complex song, because I wrote it and that’s the way music is supposed to be, as far as I know anyway.

The previous long/complex song I’d tracked (Groove95) took me eight days. I recorded it within a day, but I needed a week of rehearsals to get to that point. I didn’t have the same luxury here.

I did have a map of the song, though; last Spring I’d composed the drum track and recorded it using an electric drum kit on loan from a friend. I wanted the final recorded version of the song to feature my acoustic drums, because the electric kit hadn’t worked very well for some grooves. Two examples: ghost notes were buried in the mix, and the 16th-note hi-hat pattern during the solo section sounded like machine gun fire.

That electric-kit track was recorded in sections, as I composed them. The version of the song released here previously was assembled from the resulting parts. The assembly process was ultimately successful, but had left a bad impression on me because each edit took 10 or 20 minutes and some frustration when the joins weren’t clean — for example, when the tail of one section and the start of the next both hammered the downbeat but on different cymbals, or worse, when these downbeats were even a sixty-fourth note apart in time. During editing, it seemed it would have been a lot faster to just play the song straight through in one pass, and my takeaway lesson at the time was “it will be a lot faster to just play the song straight through in one pass.” Which is of course why recording Groove95 took me eight days.

But I had no alternatives, so I created two complete sets of input tracks in ProTools with the intention of alternating between the sets: record the first verse in set A, the second in set B, the first chorus in set A, etc. Each set had seven tracks: kick, snare, hats, stereo toms, stereo overheads. I skipped the room mic for this tune because I didn’t want to have to stitch together yet-another stream of audio.

The recording process was quick. Each section is less than 90 seconds long. It just doesn’t take very long to record 90 seconds’ worth of music. Within a couple hours I had relearned, rehearsed, and tracked the entire song, minus two drum fills that I could overdub. That was Sunday afternoon.

Monday night I overdubbed the two fills. I was so close to completing the entire five-song process that I was almost not totally stressing out. Did I mention that my wife is 38 weeks pregnant? I have been fighting a million years’ worth of nesting instinct here, turning the nursery into a recording studio for the last six weeks of my wife’s first pregnancy. I could taste my own stress, and it tasted just like your armpits after a job interview. Yeah, the one where you choked.

So it took two hours and about 30 takes to nail those fills. That sounds ridiculous, but they’re complex and I needed them to be perfect. To that end, I used ProTools to zoom in to view the waveform at about high magnification so I could see the spacing of the notes. I could see when the fill went slightly out of time, or when a velocity anomaly would cause a volume spike. Finally, the fills were perfect, and I was done.

Or so I thought…